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Kim Golaub’s body lay face up on the stainless steel table. Pathologist Dr. Toby Rose began with a visual examination. Two homicide detectives and an assistant watched.��

“This 34-year-old man was found on the street, having apparently been shot,” noted Rose, a veteran of more than 3,000 autopsies. She listed the body’s dimensions: five-foot-10, 200 pounds. She carefully removed a gold-coloured ring from the man’s right middle finger, and placed it in an evidence bag. Rose observed that the body had recent signs of a thoracotomy incision��— ER doctors had cracked his chest trying to save his life. With the help of her assistant, the dead man was turned on his side.��

“Gunshot wound to back, penetrating left upper chest,” Rose observed in her notes, after examining��a small round opening in the skin. That bullet had stayed inside the body. There were two other external injuries. One, a bullet wound to the right side of the back, just under the armpit. That bullet exited at the front, under his right breast. A third bullet wound was observed on his right hand.

Rose cut into the body. She determined the fatal wound was the bullet to the back on the left side. It passed through the left lung, which would have deflated immediately. The bullet hit the heart, and lodged in the muscle at the front of the chest. The other bullet that struck the right side of his back exited at the front, missing all the organs. Rose postulated that this bullet was the one that ended up in his hand, having expended its energy passing through the body.

It seemed likely the first shot bent the victim over, then he raised his hand to his chest, and the slowing bullet ended up in his hand. A third shot was heard by witnesses��— that bullet was never found.��

Rose also noted there was no “blackening or stippling” of the skin��— marks from unburnt gun powder coming from a gun muzzle when fired at close range. This told her the shooter fired from a distance.

Beyond confirming that Golaub died from a gunshot, Rose’s autopsy didn’t help the murder case.��

Also, no gun was found��— not at the scene, in the Mazda, or in searches of the homes of the two accused. Forensic testing of the marijuana joint found at the scene (one witness spotted a man smoking the joint just before the shooting) failed to produce a match to anyone in the federal DNA database.��Detectives shifted their hopes to getting a clue from the science of “gunshot residue.”��

When a gun’s trigger is pulled, the firing pin hits the primer at the end of the bullet, setting off a chain reaction that ignites the gunpowder and propels the bullet forward. At that moment, gases fly out of the gun muzzle, and some can escape from the rear of the gun. Finding particles of gunshot residue or “GSR” on a person can give a big assist to a criminal case. The expert used was forensic scientist Elspeth Lindsay.

Looking for GSR is a combination of old-fashioned and modern tech. Lindsay used a “stub,” a metal cylinder with sticky, double-sided tape, and followed a protocol to do “dabs” on clothing seized from Chris and Awet. The protocol requires 80 “dabs” for a T-shirt, 160 if it is long-sleeved. There’s also a protocol for pants.��

Lindsay found four particles of GSR on a grey, short-sleeved T-shirt seized from Awet’s apartment. She examined jeans and a white hoodie police also found there. No GSR on those. Oddly, she never examined a hoodie found that matched witness descriptions of the shooter’s clothes. Lindsay later told court she didn’t think it necessary, since she’d already found GSR on one of his T-shirts. (The police theory, based on witness accounts, was that Awet, running from the shooting scene, had tucked the fired gun under his hoodie, and the GSR transferred to his T-shirt.)

As to Chris Sheriffe’s clothes, there was a mistake in the normal protocol. Police officers seized clothing from the family home, but instead of laying each shirt and hoodie flat in an evidence bag, they were balled up. Lindsay did multiple tape “dabs” and found one lone particle of GSR on a hoodie. Where that GSR particle had lodged on the hoodie, Lindsay couldn’t say because of the way the hoodie was scrunched up in the bag.

One of the failings of GSR evidence is that a GSR particle is not traceable to a weapon or a bullet. Even if they did find the gun, there’d be no linking it to one of the particles.��

Partly because of that, it would eventually be argued at trial by Chris’s legal team that that the lone particle of GSR on his hoodie could have come from a police officer who was part of the search team. Active police officers handle guns daily. (Some may have gone to a firing range, or may have been cleaning their gun.)��

Still, the four particles on Awet’s clothing and the one on Chris’s shirt helped the case.��

As to the hands of the two men, no GSR was found.

Another failing in the case was the eyewitness accounts��— they were conflicting. Some had the shooter��as short, others as tall. Some said a teenager, others, mid-20s. Some said he had braids, some said no braids. And some said he had a slight beard. Another detail:��the man on the street smoking a joint just before the shooting had braids.����

Neither Awet nor Chris had braided hair.��

As to the driver of the car, nobody was able to identify him. But Chris Sheriffe was not denying being in the car that day��— his story was that he was simply driving Awet home when the older man asked to get out.��

Det. Sansom and his partner, with very little evidence to support the first-degree charges they had laid just hours after the shooting, began looking for evidence to shore up their case in advance of a preliminary hearing, where a judge would decide if the police could support the��charges.��

Sansom said that from his interview with Awet, he learned he was with a group that was at a hotel the night before.

Awet and Chris “met two girls. And they took them back to a hotel and spent the night with them,” recalls Sansom. His partner, Det. Andrew Ecklund, went looking for them.

“So the following week I think I was in court and my partner ... took some coppers and went door to door,” Sansom recalls. “Down around the airport. Went to a hotel. And then they were able to identify the girls because one of the girls paid for the hotel room with her credit card.”

Actually, the young woman, a college student, didn’t pay for the room. But she had given her ID at the hotel. That led detectives to the two young women and their story. They had been at barbecues the Saturday night, had gone to a dance club with a bunch of people, including Chris��and Awet. Then they spent the night at a hotel and were dropped off at one of the young women’s places, an apartment on Kipling Avenue. Police checked the apartment’s security video and found the drop-off was just before the shooting on Mount Olive.

Det. Sansom says the apartment video gave the time of the drop-off.

“I think it was like six minutes away from the shooting. Which is pretty decent evidence.”

According to one of the young women, Awet told Chris during the car ride that “he wanted to go stop somewhere.”��

Sansom’s theory was that shortly after the young women were dropped off, Awet and Chris drove by the Mount Olive barbecue, spotted Kim Golaub wearing a red shirt, signifying to them that he was a rival gang member from the Bloods. (Under this early theory, Chris and Awet were members of the Crips.)��

“So they were just driving by and happened to see the victims standing there with this red thing on. And, you know, my guess is that they just said to each other, hey, there’s an a—hole from two weeks ago or let’s, you know, and they came up with a plan that was about 30 seconds in the making. You know, you pull over here. Keep the car running, I’ll go do him and I’ll be right back. I think it was as simple as that.”

The police investigation determined that Golaub had no gang connections��— he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. His family declined interview requests from the Star for this series. One of the barbecue guests, Barrington Chatrie, said, “I don’t think anybody wants to talk about that day.”

Looking for evidence of planning, police also examined Awet and Chris’s cellphones. They found nothing regarding Chris’s involvement. But on Awet’s phone they did find what appeared to be a suspicious��text chain just eight days before the shooting. Someone asked Awet for “teeth for da ting.” Police say that’s street talk for bullets for a gun. Awet texts back, “don’t have it.” Police never spoke to the person who sent that text.

What you have just read is the totality of evidence against both men leading up to a bail hearing for Chris Sheriffe, followed by a preliminary hearing, where a judge would be asked to determine if there was enough evidence to try them on charges of first-degree murder.��

Only Chris asked to be released on bail. A judge granted the request, made by his lawyer, Christopher Hicks. His parents, Marjorie and Lloyd, put up a surety of $250,000. Marjorie recalls that as a good day in a very difficult time for her family, as��the evidence didn’t seem to impress the judge.

“The judge said, no, it is as far as what you guys have, you guys have nothing. So I have to give Mr. Sheriffe bail,” Marjorie recalls.

The next step was the preliminary hearing. Judge Paul French heard the Crown’s evidence over three weeks in late 2010, the year after the shooting. No motive was provided by the Crown attorney prosecuting the case. Nor was there any evidence that either Awet or Chris was in a gang. Detectives in the Guns and Gangs task force kept detailed records of gang members, and their names were simply not there.

French gave his ruling three months later. Marjorie, Chris’s mom, was in the courtroom.

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French said the case was weak. He reduced the charges. Awet went from first-degree murder to second-degree. And Chris, down to accessory after the fact, a significantly lower charge. The judge found no evidence that Chris was part of any plot��— he simply drove away someone who may or may not have been the shooter. For Hicks, Chris’s defence lawyer, this was a second big win, coming after his client was released on bail (and put on house arrest). A judge had agreed with what his client had said all along.

Hicks, recalling that victory at the preliminary hearing, said his client’s story was simple. “He said, I didn’t do it.��I don’t know what anybody else did. I said I was in the car. I don’t know who shot this guy.”

The police were angry. The prosecutors, too. They felt confident they had enough on Awet to convince a jury that he was the shooter. But Chris, what about him? Surely he wasn’t an innocent bystander, giving a pal a ride. Prosecutors appealed French’s ruling, and started looking for more information. They needed proof that both men were in a gang.